Miniaturized Wearable System for Multimodal EEG/ECG/EMG Sensing and Real-Time Physiological Monitoring

Real-time physiological state awareness is central to next-generation wearable computing, yet most existing electrophysiological signal acquisition platforms remain limited to single-modality sensing, high component cost, or bulky form factors that hinder everyday deployment. Here, we present a compact, low-cost wearable platform for simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG) acquisition. The system integrates an analog front-end, a microcontroller, and a Bluetooth wireless link on a compact single-board platform (5.6 × 3.8 cm, approximately 12.8 g with the selected lithium-polymer battery installed), with an estimated bill-of-materials cost of 67.40 USD. Experimental validation across three healthy subjects, with the ECG channel additionally benchmarked against a commercial clinical-grade ambulatory ECG recorder, demonstrates that the platform captures ECG waveforms with recognizable P-QRS-T morphology under controlled recording conditions, supports reliable R-peak detection and heart rate estimation, records stable resting-state EEG spectral features, and distinguishes EMG activation from resting baseline in both time-domain amplitude and time-frequency structure. Leveraging the real-time wireless data link between the wearable hardware and a PC-hosted MATLAB environment, we further explore application-oriented signal processing scenarios. As an offline algorithm-pipeline compatibility demonstration, a CNN-based seizure detection pipeline is applied to the Bonn EEG benchmark for five-class epileptic state classification, achieving 86.60% mean classification accuracy. The proposed system offers a scalable and affordable foundation for wearable human-state-aware interaction, with potential applications in clinical monitoring, rehabilitation, and brain–computer interfaces.